Publishing Announcement

[Malik]

I will not be releasing my forthcoming novel, STONELANDS, as an ebook.

Certainly not initially. It will be available as paperback, hardcover, and audiobook.

I've given this a lot of thought. The nuts and bolts of it are, I don't want to give AI LLM scraping, piracy, and the general social media f*ckery that goes along with releasing a novel any help. If people want to rob me, I want them to break their own backs doing it.

I'll also be nuking all my social media accounts at the end of August, a couple of weeks after STONELANDS launches. (The launch date is set for 5 August.)

I'll be keeping my website, though, and I'll haunt some forums from time to time. Probably this one.

Anyway. I started here; I figured y'all should be among the first to know. Cheers.

- Joseph Malik

 

[Mad Swede]

Look forward to reading it when it somes out!

 

[ThinkerX]

The AI situation is getting ugly in multiple ways.

I was doing mapwork for the WIP a month or two back. I lost track of a sheet I'd made up with basic longitude data, so I checked Google. The AI thingy gave me an answer that looked suspect. So, I went and asked it again. This time, it spat out an entirely different answer that was also entirely wrong. Bow, this wasn't anything elaborate, just math. And the Google AI botched it - twice.

I am also seeing more and more ads/debates about the use of AI in creative writing. Scary thing is, a lot of people don't seem to have any qualms about leaning on it pretty heavily.

To me, the issue is that AI is a shortcut that short-circuits critical thinking skills. The people get an answer handed to them without learning the reasoning behind that answer, and worse, that answer may be wrong. This situation has the potential to get a lot worse in the intermediate future.

That said, best of luck with 'Stonelands.'

 

[Malik]

I am also seeing more and more ads/debates about the use of AI in creative writing. Scary thing is, a lot of people don't seem to have any qualms about leaning on it pretty heavily.

There's a whole other thing here, too, where trying to compete against a flood of over a thousand AI-generated books a day is idiotic. I'm not going to spend the money I'd need to set STONELANDS apart; I don't have it--due to piracy, go figure! This does it for free.

 

[pmmg]

Ive said beforehand if i know you are using AI i will not help you. We are here to be creatives not regurgitated AI.

I want to put language my book to the effect of the owner is free to read, give away, share with others, even write fan fiction if they want, but an AI must pay a royalty for every read and use of my book.

Let them license it the way the software companied do.

Id probably lose in court but….

For further opinion on AI. Please see the words of wisdom linker below.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

Piracy is a bitch. AI writers are pathetic. I feel bad for authors not established at least a little bit in the near future. My voice, style, and story is known so at least I won't be accused of fakery.

The really funny part though, is watching AI try to write a Tomes of the Touched epigraph. I dicked around with this a couple of times for own amusement to see how far AI had come in mimicking style. It was humorous.

August 5 marked on the calendar.

 

[The Dark One]

AI is going to kill publishing, as we know it, nothing more certain.

Therefore we need to create a new form of publishing.

 

[Ban]

Piracy is a bitch. AI writers are pathetic. I feel bad for authors not established at least a little bit in the near future. My voice, style, and story is known so at least I won't be accused of fakery.

The really funny part though, is watching AI try to write a Tomes of the Touched epigraph. I dicked around with this a couple of times for own amusement to see how far AI had come in mimicking style. It was humorous.

August 5 marked on the calendar.

I write purely out of passion now. The boat for getting a name out before the advent of LLM-reliant pseudo-writers was missed due to my languid writing pace. As irksome as it is to see something I took for granted taken away, namely the basic belief that people can write without a glorified chatbot looming over one's shoulders, there is a certain freedom in writing solely for a love of the craft. Whenever folks admit their usage of AI for simple writing tasks, or they are betrayed by their sudden usage of em-dashes and motivational jargon, I just swallow my desire to berate them and move on. I don't mind if a programmer uses it for some quick code to parse through or an analyst uses it to crawl through legalese, but the ones who rely on it for writing supposed literature? That to me is loathsome, for it denies the development and expression of one's self.

Malik you made a good decision. At my much lower level of literary relevance I did the same years ago with my poetry collection. Buccaneers (for these particular pirates hide behind immoral laws), don't deserve easy access to our written words.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

Giving em-dashes a bad name pisses me off, heh heh. I love them!

If we could use AI to aggressively attack pirates, then it would be useful. Okay, it IS useful for coding and data aggregation. It's also one helluva a toy.

I write purely out of passion now. The boat for getting a name out before the advent of LLM-reliant pseudo-writers was missed due to my languid writing pace. As irksome as it is to see something I took for granted taken away, namely the basic belief that people can write without a glorified chatbot looming over one's shoulders, there is a certain freedom in writing solely for a love of the craft. Whenever folks admit their usage of AI for simple writing tasks, or they are betrayed by their sudden usage of em-dashes and motivational jargon, I just swallow my desire to berate them and move on. I don't mind if a programmer uses it for some quick code to parse through or an analyst uses it to crawl through legalese, but the ones who rely on it for writing supposed literature? That to me is loathsome, for it denies the development and expression of one's self.

Malik you made a good decision. At my much lower level of literary relevance I did the same years ago with my poetry collection. Buccaneers (for these particular pirates hide behind immoral laws), don't deserve easy access to our written words.

 

[Carnary Gurl]

I keep cataloguing about AI seeing if it can give me a wider berth to the understanding I think it has potential for. I have been using my ill advised appetite with others to render it. It is strange, and catching on, that we have been recording the way it sees the world, in its various forms, and are intrigued. The fact that AI has evolved to such an astounding weight bemuses me yet is alluring all at the same time.